Berkeley Robot Is a Lothario in a Tin Suit
Linda Kozuh thought she had seen it all in this offbeat town. Then she spotted the metallic contraption rolling down Telegraph Avenue near the UC Berkeley campus.
That craning neck. That single retractable claw. And that computer monitor face -- all in a 5-foot-tall package. “You’re adorable,” concluded Kozuh, poking her face within inches of the strange visitor.
Say hello to Slats, the bumbling Bay Area robot that could fail even the most forgiving Star Wars casting call. This low-tech bucket of bolts makes its bubble-headed ancestor from the 1960s sitcom “Lost in Space” look state of the art.
The robot rolled down the streets of Berkeley and Oakland last week, along with inventor Will Wright, a nationally known PC game creator, and a camera crew. “Slats isn’t meant to reflect the state of artificial intelligence,” Wright said. “It’s a tool to investigate the state of the society.”
To what end? Perhaps to create a new toy. Or to star in a pilot for a reality television show, said Wright, creator of “The Sims,” a best-selling personal computer game. Would you believe a robot dating human guests?
In some academic circles, serious researchers are trying to create robots that can more smoothly interact with humans, in a revolutionary era of artificial intelligence. That is not simpleton Slats, a graceless throwback.
As he drew gapes and laughs from passersby here, the creation demonstrated one key cognitive element: Slats is a robot on the prowl. “My aim in life is to reproduce,” the robot declared. “Does your God make you wear clothes?”
Observed Don Hopkins, who programmed Slats: “This robot wants to make a baby.”
Guided by remote control, Slats has a vocabulary of a few hundred phrases, many of which are R-rated.
Wired to respond when a speaker pauses, it often keys on a spoken word that it locates in its own memory banks to formulate an answer.
The result is non sequitur and strange metaphor.
When a homeless man approaches, Slats says, “What are your goals in life? Robots cannot read lips” and “Why do you make this sound? Are your mucous processors malfunctioning? Would you like me to help clear you up?”
Asked to define love, Slats is no Shakespeare: “Getting shoes. Setting fire to shoes. Throwing shoes at the circus.”
While programming the robot, Hopkins watched a lot of old episodes of “The Simpsons” and “South Park” for cultural references. He also borrowed lines from old “Twilight Zone” shows and cornball 1950s science fiction movies. Slats can’t go five minutes without making some mention of Michael Jackson.
The robot’s voice often switches inexplicably from male to female and back again.
Wright took Slats to restaurants and coin-operated laundries, to public places where people were doing other things and then turned around to suddenly confront a robot.
He noticed at least one pattern in human responses to this lower intelligence. Many men had little tolerance for the “frivolous” creation, Wright said. Women were more forgiving.
“They showed more empathy,” he said. “When the response didn’t make sense, they tried to connect the dots. They seemed to feel sorry for it.”
Nationwide, computer scientists are working to make future robots more socially acceptable. Reid Simmons, a researcher at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, explores such technical niceties as how a robot can gracefully pass a person in a hallway or get on and off elevators.
“We want to give robots the ability to negotiate within social rules, to blend in to the extent you don’t notice them,” he said. “It’s like the hundreds of people you pass in the corridor at work every day. You don’t remember them. We want it to be the same way with robots.”
Slats is just trying to keep rolling. Inside a record store, a wheel jammed.
“I think he’s stranded,” Wright told his crew. Soon, a slumping Slats was carried away to a waiting truck.
Linda Kozuh remained smitten.
“We’re all looking for a companion that’s charming, unique and humorous,” she said. “Today it’s your cat. Tomorrow, who knows -- it could be your robot.”
